Craig Fuller, Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 The Uinta Basin and Mountains are located in the northeast corner of the state and are part of a larger physiographic area known as the Colorado Plateau Province. The Uinta Mountains, a folded and faulted anticlinorium (a succession of geological anticlines and synclines), are 150 miles long and are oriented in an east-west direction; …
Great Basin
Gary B. Peterson Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 The Great Basin is defined by hydrology and physiography. It is a region of interior drainage bounded prominently on the west by the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range and on the east by the middle Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau. Less distinct are its northern boundary with the Columbia Plateau and …
Colorado Plateau
Joseph M. Bauman, Jr. Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 The Colorado Plateau is a physiographic province encompassing 130,000 square miles of the Four Corners states, including Utah’s southeastern quarter. Arguably, it is the least-tamed country remaining in the lower forty-eight states. It is a land of outstanding natural beauty and ecological diversity. The high, semi-arid region is actually a gigantic basin …
Pioneering African Americans
Miriam B. Murphy Beehive History 22 The names Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby are inscribed on monuments and remembered by Utah school children as the three African American slaves who came to Utah with the first company of Mormon pioneers. Beyond that, most children and adults know little about the three men and even less about the free …
The Gardo House: A History of the Mansion and Its Occupants
On November 26, 1921, a crowd gathered at 70 E. South Temple Street in downtown Salt Lake City to watch the demolition of a Victorian mansion. One onlooker was ninety-year-old John Brown. In spite of the November chill and the fact that it was his birthday, Brown had come to pay his last respects to the doomed building; he had …
The Telegraph was the Information Highway of the 1860s
Miriam B. Murphy History Blazer, October 1995 On May 24, 1844, the message “What hath God wrought” was sent by telegraph from Baltimore, Maryland, to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. A new era in long-distance communications had begun. Within a few years local companies were busily stringing the “talking wire” between many cities and towns. In 1861 the Pacific Telegraph …
Early Greek Immigrants
Helen Zeese Papanikolas Utah Historical Quarterly V. 22 #2 The Greek immigrant was the last of the Europeans to come to America. Fewer than two thousand Greeks were in the entire country before the 1880s. The first arrivals were young boys bought by American naval officers and philanthropists on the Turkish slave block. They were sent to the United States …
Greek Sheepmen
GREEK SHEEPMEN BROUGHT OLD-COUNTRY WAYS TO UTAH Helen Z. Papanikolas History Blazer, September 1995 At the beginning of this century, many men and boys from Greece found work in Utah mines and on railroad gangs. They had come from a pastoral people who spent the greater part of the year driving sheep and goats to mountains for summer pasture and …
South Slav Community in Midvale
MIDVALE WAS HOME TO A VIBRANT SOUTH SLAV COMMUNITY Miriam B. Murphy History Blazer, August 1995 As early as 1890 Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes began arriving in the Midvale-Murray area seeking work in the smelters. Many of them came to stay after the turn of the century, in part because of poor agricultural conditions in the Old Country and labor …
The Fall of Skliris, “Czar of the Greeks”
THE FALL OF LEONIDAS SKLIRIS, “CZAR OF THE GREEKS” Jeffrey D. Nichols History Blazer, December 1996 The lure of jobs in the American West drew thousands of immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many came from Greece, convinced by the promises of Leonidas G. Skliris, a Salt Lake City-based labor agent who became known as “the Czar of …